For those of a certain age in Britain, Cate Blanchett has provided the most bizarre moment of this year’s Cannes film festival. Her persona respectfully brings up the name of the late Roy Jenkins, a notable Labour figure who served as chancellor of Oxford University and the exchequer. As the first president of the European Commission permitted to attend a G7 summit (which, as political trivia buffs would say, is “one for the heads”), Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor named Hilda Ortmann. Maybe in her next movie, Blanchett can give a major speech about Peter Shore.
The humorous absurdist comedy Rumours was co-written and directed by Guy Maddin, a Canadian filmmaker, and his longtime partners, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The emotional struggles that are alleged to have accompanied the making of the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album served as the inspiration for the title. A fictitious G7 meeting is taking place in a woodland in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony. Seven ministers are meeting to talk about an unidentified (but seemingly ecological) crisis and to draft a long and incredibly useless communiqué that, as Hilda whispers to President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), her French counterpart, should be worded vaguely enough so they are not committed to any specific action.
The US president Edison Wolcott is portrayed by Charles Dance, who speaks incoherently in his native English. The script makes fun of Dance’s apparent reluctance to adopt an American accent, yet it’s clear that Dance is capable of doing so. Stressed out over her affair with the troubled Canadian premier and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries a torch for European Commission secretary-general Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and shares a moment with Hilda, is British prime minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Takehiro Hira portrays the quiet, reserved Japanese premier Tatsuro Iwesaki, while Rolando Ravello plays the jittery Italian prime minister Antonio Lamorte.
They are completely alone, save for the 2,000-year-old humans discovered embalmed in the Dankerode clay, who are now coming to life and staggering around the area while frantically masturbating in the hopes that the ensuing tsunami of seed will both put out the catastrophic fires and create an enlightened new people. Their lakeside G7 dinner is thrown into chaos when they realise their phones are dead.
This is an extremely peculiar movie that resembles a cross between TS Eliot’s The Cocktail Party and George A. Romero with an Agatha Christie that is neither criminal nor detective. Blanchett leads the group in some quite funny set pieces, demonstrating that she is actually pretty excellent at playing comedy. She informs her six guests at the dinner that this year’s summit will have the theme of “regret” and asks them to go around the table and share their worst regrets. Tatsuro quite charmingly laments not having learned to ride a horse, and Sylvain chokes back tears as he laments never having understood his father. It’s obvious that the other members in the group are under pressure to say something impactful or poignant. The Italian president is next, and he immediately admits that he regrets dressing up as Mussolini for a fancy dress party.
Stories about odd encounters in the wild and post-apocalyptic occurrences are peculiar and perplexing. An artificial intelligence chatbot tool created to catch paedophiles is the subject of a rather weird joke. When Hilda finds the goodie bags that the G7 members were meant to get, she notes that each one now contains a cyanide tablet; she clarifies that this is now standard procedure. A satirical narrative about the world’s slow demise.
Rumours was a feature film that was screened at Cannes.
